Former education secretary calls for department to be eliminated

Betsy DeVos, who was secretary of education during the Trump administration, would like to see her old department eliminated. “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” she said at a Moms for Liberty event in Florida.

Republicans have talked about shrinking or eliminating the department for many years, she said. The department has overseen decreasing test scores for decades. However, taking practical steps such as block grants to the states, a proposal recently introduced to Congress, could turn the tide and create a feasible option to make the idea a reality.

“Just watching how the system has performed or not performed the last two years, I think makes this argument of shrinking the department to be much more potent,” DeVos told “The Daily Caller.”

She laid out a five-point plan to reform education for Republicans to implement if the party can dominate Congress after the November midterm elections. In addition to eliminating the department, her plan includes supporting multiple pathways to post-K-12 education, federal student aid reform and restoring Title IX. However, educational freedom, which would allow parents to send their children to various schools, marks the former department head’s most important reform.

“The solution to that is to have policies that will actually allow the resources to follow the family, to follow the child, to wherever their family decides they’re going to learn best,” DeVos said.

The Department of Education recently announced a National Parents and Families Engagement Council that claims to find “constructive ways to help families engage at the local level” with “listening sessions” to help students recover from the pandemic. DeVos called the council “laughable,” adding that parents across the country remain upset about how the system handled their children and how out of touch with reality the “folks in Washington” have become for protecting the system by sending the FBI to investigate parents as domestic terrorists.

The former education department head joined more than 20 speakers during the summit, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Dr. Ben Carson and James Lindsay.

–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice